What’s on TV Saturday: ‘S.N.L.’ and ‘Barbara’

John Mulaney returns to “Saturday Night Live,” less than a year after his first hosting gig. And as “Transit” hits theaters, revisit Christian Petzold’s 2012 character study, “Barbara.”

What’s on TV

SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE 11:30 p.m. on NBC. The singer-songwriter Thomas Rhett performs a day after the release of his new single, “Look What God Gave Her,” while the sparkly eyed comic John Mulaney hosts. Even with all his acting roles (“Big Mouth,” “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”), Mulaney never strayed too far from his friends at “S.N.L.” He wrote for the show for five years, starting in 2008, but what he really wanted was to be on camera — so much so that he jokingly claimed to have auditioned 44 times. (He eventually landed some appearances.) Now he’s returning to host for the second time; his first gig, in April 2018, featured jokes that made it into his popular Netflix special “Kid Gorgeous at Radio City.”

JUST ADD ROMANCE (2019) 8 p.m. on Hallmark. Sparks flew when two aspiring chefs, Carly (Meghann Fahy) and Jason (Luke Macfarlane), met at culinary school in New York. Then Jason suddenly left the city to take care of family matters, and Carly didn’t hear a peep. Now, three years later, they cross paths again as contestants on a cooking show in Chicago, and the flirtation is back on. But as they compete for the chance to have their own restaurant, the contest gets in the way of their chemistry.

LOVE & MARRIAGE: HUNTSVILLE 10 p.m. on OWN. Three couples try to bring life back to Huntsville, Ala., through a joint real estate venture while navigating their relationships in this reality show. In the first season finale, their enterprise and their personal lives are on shaky ground. As Martell prepares for surgery, Melody warns him that she may not be able to look past his cheating and that things will change after his recovery. And Tisha’s hopes to become a working mother put her marriage on the rocks.

BARBARA (2012) stream on Mubi; rent on iTunes, Google Play, Mubi, Vudu or YouTube. Christian Petzold’s new thriller, “Transit,” about a refugee who flees to France and assumes a dead novelist’s identity, recalls the German director’s slow-burning drama, “Barbara.” Nina Hoss stars as the title character, a doctor banished from a prestigious Berlin institution to a pediatric hospital in the countryside of East Germany in 1980. She takes her new post under the watchful eye of the secret police and yearns to flee to the West, but she is soon torn by her devotion to a desperate patient (Jasna Fritzi Bauer) and a bubbling romance with a young doctor (Ronald Zehrfeld). Manohla Dargis named the film a Critic’s Pick in her review for The New York Times, writing that “while Barbara may just look like she’s letting down her defenses, what you witness is the revelation of a moral imperative that is itself profoundly political.”